This paper presents a speech enhancement approach derived by using a piecewise
linear approximation (PLA) of an explicit model of environmental distortions. PLA
is a generalization of two traditional approaches, namely vector Taylor series
(VTS) and MAX approximations. Formulations are described for both maximum
likelihood (ML) estimation of noise model parameters and minimum mean-squared
error (MMSE) estimation of clean speech. Evaluation experiments are conducted to
enhance speech signals corrupted by several types of additive noises. Compared to
the traditional MAX-approximation based approach, our PLA-based speech
enhancement approach achieves better performance in terms of two objective
quality measures, namely segmental SNR and log-spectral distortion.